Any corruption? Currently suspended by FIFA’s Executive Committee for an improper payment from Sepp Blatter.

Allies: Key figures in UEFA including Gianni Infantino, who will quickly drop out if Platini can stand for election.Enemies: Sepp Blatter. Jerome Champagne (enemy perhaps too strong but certainly there is animus between them).

Links to other candidates: Joined at the hip with Infantino. Part of the puppeteer set-up that controlled Prince Ali in last election but now estranged from him.

“I’m bullet-proof.” That is how Michel Platini, then president of UEFA and leading candidate to replace Sepp Blatter at the helm of FIFA, characterised himself in October upon learning that FIFA had suspended him for 90 days. Platini’s suspension, which coincided with that of Blatter, focused on the circumstances of a 2011 transfer of CHF 2 million to Platini from FIFA.

Platini’s suspension bars him from any football-related activities which means that for the first time since 1973, when he was 17 years old and joined the first team of French club Nancy, Platini was not involved in top-level football.

Platini helped lead France to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, Les Bleus‘ first appearance since 1966. He captained the 1982 French squad that made it to the semi-finals of the World Cup in Spain where they were sent home after losing a penalty shootout to Germany in a closely contested, physical match. Platini would later call that game his “my greatest memory in football, even though we lost.”

The successful World Cup, coupled with powerful patrons, led to positions as the vice-president of the French Football Federation in 2000 and membership on both the UEFA and FIFA executive committees in 2002. He was elected UEFA president in 2006. Platini’s ascension to the top of the football world seemed inevitable.

The selections of Russia and Qatar by the FIFA executive committee in December 2010 and the revelations about corruption associated with that vote set off a chain of events culminating in the ongoing investigations of global football by the US Department of Justice and Swiss Federal authorities.

Platini has been a victim of the investigations. He successfully weathered an allegation that he had accepted the gift of a Picasso painting from Vladimir Putin in exchange for his vote in support of Russia. However, when it was revealed that Sepp Blatter had paid Platini 2 million Swiss francs for work allegedly done years before and improperly accounted for by FIFA, that revelation proved too much to survive. The newly motivated FIFA Ethics Committee suspended them both, and the former mentor and student, now bitter enemies sparring in public, were on the outside looking in.

As I write this in mid-November 2015, Sepp Blatter has been in the hospital with stress-related health problems, while Platini is seeking to rejoin the FIFA presidential race. FIFA has placed him in limbo and is not going forward with his announced candidacy until the allegations levied against him by the FIFA Ethics Committee are resolved. Platini may yet survive the allegations against him, and enter the FIFA presidential race, and perhaps even win the election. Or his days in football may be over.

We shall find out soon how “bullet proof” he actually is. For Michel Platini, as with FIFA, everything hangs in the balance.